March 22, 2004

Pas Comme Les Autres

I don't have time to write much tonight. But I would like to point you to a guest piece by Gabriel Gonzalez at Winds of Change.

Gabriel is a frequent contributer to my comments section, so some of you will recognize his name. He lives in Paris and has a great deal to say about what's up with French foreign policy. Those who think France is an American ally, albeit a highly critical one, might want to take a fresh look from the inside.

(P.S. If you would like to comment, please read the linked piece first.)

Posted by Michael J. Totten at March 22, 2004 08:53 PM

Comments

I'm especially troubled that France hasn't been held to account for their role in the Rwandan genocide. If even a fraction of what they're accused of is true, then this indeed is a rogue nation.

It is difficult for me to see a way that we can have relations with a country as cynical and immoral as the one Gabriel Gonzalez describes. On the other hand, France is the core of the EU, so we must deal with them. Makes me glad I don't work for the State Department.

My car came equipped with Michelin tires.The tires have been excellent-smooth riding,quiet, good tread wear, but they'll need replacement soon and I won't be buying Michelin again. Simply because they're French.

I'd be interested to understand the reasons behind France's moral and cultural respectability in the United States, and presumably abroad. Could it be that the lack of internal debate and self-criticism is the basis for observers' conclusions, especially in constrast to the level of self-doubt and self-reproach in the U.S. which is abundantly exposed to the world? Could it simply be a history of French cultural cache among American intellectual and artistic circles? Perhaps such self-confidence is naturally attractive to Americans with a tradition of distrust in their own leaders. Perhaps in the shadow of the world's lone superpower, other countries can simply get away with more.

"I'd be interested to understand the reasons behind France's moral and cultural respectability in the United States, and presumably abroad."

It's the strong attraction to collectivist solutions to life's problems as well as the cafeteria approach to personal morals which characterizes that section of the population we loosely call "the Left."

Could it be that the lack of internal debate and self-criticism is the basis for observers' conclusions, especially in constrast to the level of self-doubt and self-reproach in the U.S. which is abundantly exposed to the world? Could it simply be a history of French cultural cache among American intellectual and artistic circles?

Nate:

Methinks you might get a kewpie doll on those two.

The US has aired its dirty laundry on slavery, Native Americans, racism, class and the whole shebang for all to see far more than it has been done in Europe. We still have "vibrant" debate on these matters. Also since we have had a continuous government we have had to take accountability for all of our own sins (I don't buy the line that we can blow off slavery or the civil war and blame Jefferson Davis, and no one invaded us to free the slaves).

Meanwhile in Europe, they can blame their own past sins on the Nazis/Fascists, Vichy, Communists, Royals, Franco, Maggie Thatcher and the Jay-ee-double-you-esses as if they all came to Europe in flying saucers form Mars or possibly Idaho ("they couldn't possibly be European, we have too much "nuance" to do that"). But I wouldn't call it "self doubt." I call it maturity (ironically found in the younger of the two). It takes an adult to admit their mistakes. Europe's cultural elites are claiming, based in their arguments and self-absolutions, that it is they who are the newer model when it comes to dealing with their past, all-the-while chiding America for being the brat of the world. They seek to have it both ways. They’ve gotten so used to, I wonder if they can't tell the "last regime" from what they did "last week."

And as for your second argument above, heck yes. To be sophisticated for many people is to be European (or at least from the right part of New York, Connecticut or Massachusetts). Once again, second-handed posing is hardly the sign of maturity. Indeed, it often looks rather silly when Americans put on European airs (its like watching a teenager look kewl by smoking).

"It's the strong attraction to collectivist solutions to life's problems as well as the cafeteria approach to personal morals which characterizes that section of the population we loosely call the Left"...

Sigh. It hasn't always been this way. The "cafeteria approach" to morality is a post-Vietnam phenomenon in America. Once upon a time, it was different. Truman was hardly what I would call a "cafeteria apporach" kind of guy.

But, I've got to admit you're right in pointing out the current state of affairs. As Allan Bloom would say, the "Nietzcheanization of the Left" is complete. Relativism has killed the bleeding heart. It's sad, really.

One big change in my thinking since 9-11 is actually a reduction in my own cynicism, in the sense that I appreciate the good things I/we DO have, much more than I once did.

In keeping with that, I ask where would we be w/o the Internet in general and the blogosphere specifically? The general quality of discussion (despite the occasional eruption of ill will and/or ignorance) that appears in these comment threads, and on a site like Winds of Change, is something many of us would never be privy to before now, or would at least be difficult to come by regularly. The comments discussion over at WOC about Gonzalez' article is well worth checking out as well.

I've seen people blame past sins of Europe on all the above list, but not on Thatcher. People have blamed her policies for various problems since she left office but no one has claimd that she's responsible for things that took place before she was around.

Personally I've always thought that the list of ideologies and people you use were our past sins.

I was kidding on the Thatcher part (and maybe Idaho). Ya Silly Silly Boy :-p...

But I WILL defininitely credit you for accepting the rest of the list as europe's own past and not flukes to be barred from debate. In my experience in some cases, "Europhile" rules of debate seem to have a 1933-1945 waiver clause while the US must be eternally damned [as an example] for slavery, even though the US resolved it herself in a bloody civil war a quarter-century before WW2, the moment any debate begins to tilt toward the american's favor.

Don't get me started on how the liberal of 1950 is today's conservative.

And yeah, I hate moral relativism. If so many genuinely intelligent people realized today how much historians will be laughing at them in 50 years, they'd be crying into their New York Times.

So few people on the Right and Left will admit how much political correctness has made war on common sense over the past 20 years. We're like the mad waltzers of 19th-century Europe, and our feverishness distracts us as the corrupt, like the French government, plunder us.

I read "The Closing of the American Mind" when I was 20; I've never quite got over it.

"In keeping with that, I ask where would we be w/o the Internet in general and the blogosphere specifically?"

I personally would be very lost and very uninformed, and scarier still, not even realize it. What is interesting is that since 9/11 and I inadvertently discovered the Blogosphere is that I have become politcally radicalized (in a good sense). What is hard is leaving forums like this and having discussions with others in real life. If politics comes up, when I discuss some of the things I've learned, people laugh and say "Oh, you got that off the Internet". It is amazing how people are willing to channel their information exclusively to the New York Times and CNN. It is also scary.

A lot of it rings true, but I'd be more persuaded if he backed it up with references.

Thanks for the input.

Please realize that the piece on France what's written up originally as a couple of informal comments reacting to several other posts in the Winds of Change comments section. They were then literally "pieced together" in about an hour's time and presented as a comprehensive article. The piece is pretty long as it is and further developments and links would have cluttered it up too much, I think. I consider the information reliable and balanced, if incomplete. I think in a future post, we will provide more detail. I assure you that the examples given can all be very well substantiated - and there are more. The political "theory" of course is a matter of point of view and is not as easily "documented", but can to some extent be done. That is a more complex scholarly task.

I am realizing that it is important to get out information about - I could say "expose" - French foreign policy, how it affects global policy and the WoT in particular, and implications for U.S. policy.

In the future, we will put out one or more posts with specific references. It would be good to have a full debate on the issue of how to deal with the French, as well as alternative views, hopefully in the context of a "constructive" dialogue.

I've been amazed how 9/11 made me re-think pretty much the whole of American history, as I had saw it up until then. I realized that I had all too easily swallowed the Zinn/Chomsky/Moore narrative of the country, as so many young people did-- and still do-- which goes something like this: "Once upon a time, a bunch of rich white slaveholders broke off from England purely for business reasons disguised as democratic idealism, and they proceeded to genocide the American Indians, after which, following pressure from Northen industrial interests, launched the Civil War, which really had nothing to do with slavery. Then came brutal colonialism in Cuba, Philipines, Hawaii, etc. etc. for similar reasons, after which FDR pushed us into a war (again to serve the military industrial complex) against the Nazis and the Japanese imperial army, who were only slightly worse than us. A few war crimes later, we then engaged in a fictional war against communism, which really involved oppressing idealistic, indigenous socialist movements around the world on behalf of multinational corporations. Then 9/11 happened, and after that long sorry record, who can be the least bit surprised?"

And the thing, the entirety of that simplistic-if-not-outright-mendacious narrative-- all of it-- has to be challenged. Because accepting it leads straightforwardly to the conclusion, "Why defend ourselves against terrorists when there's nothing about us worth defending?"

Thanks also to Sam who made a similar point about lack of references. (Since I'm pretty familiar with France, French culture, politics, foreign policy, etc., I sort of assume - wrongly I guess - that most people are aware of the original source materials.

I've been amazed how 9/11 made me re-think pretty much the whole of American history, as I had saw it up until then.

It is amazing how many people totally re-adjusted their outlook based on this single event. I wonder how many other watersheds in history have been like that and what was the most recent one before 9/11...

JFK? not sure, too young. Apollo moon landing? not really, Sputnik? More likely.... Pearl Harbor? Bet that's a good one. Bush v2.0 being elected? Maybe for some - I imagine it was where they stopped being liberals and started being idiotarians (but seriously...) others?

I enjoyed reading your article. I was wondering if you are familiar with the works of world-renowned scholar Bat Yeor who wrote a lot on the concept of dhimmitude. I just finished reading an article of hers entitled "Eurabia" in which she discusses the notion that the French and other Europeans for many decades have been conspiring to undermine U.S. power and to favor the Palestinians by purposely establishing economic and diplomatic ties with Arab countries. I quote from her article:

The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) began as a French initiative composed of representatives from the EC and Arab League countries. ... The EAD was the vehicle for legitimizing the propaganda of the PLO, procuring it international diplomatic recognition, and conferring on Arafat's terrorist movement honor and international stature by supporting Arafat's address to the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 13, 1974 . Through the labyrinth of the EAD system, a policy of Israel's delegitimization was planned at both the EC's national and international levels. ... The cogs created by the EAD led the EC (later the European Union) to tolerate Palestinian terrorism on its own territory, to justify it, and finally to finance Palestinian infrastructure - later to become the Palestinian Authority - and hate-mongering educational system. The ministers and intellectuals who have created Eurabia deny the current wave of criminal attacks against European Jews, which they, themselves, have inspired. ... The cracks between Europe and America reveal the divergences between the choice of liberty and the road back to Munich on which the European Union continues to caper to new Arab-Islamic tunes, now called "occupation," "peace and justice," and "immigrants' rights" - themes which were composed for Israel's burial. And for Europe's demise." ("Eurabia", National Review, 2002/10/09)

Adapting Yeor's theories, I am now beginning to wonder if the French Jews are being subjected to a less conspicuous form of dhimmitude in their own country.

Probably nobody remembers the report from communist parties 20th congress (circa 1955) when Chrushtzov (sp?) gave a detailed report of Stalin's crimes. For many communists and socialists this was a catastrophic rupture.

Some, like many eurpean socialists were not moved and still try to have another go at socialism.

It is amazing how many people totally re-adjusted their outlook based on this single event.

I wonder how many people changed their outlook based on the reaction to this single event.

I can remember the exact moment my worldview was thrown into doubt. I was lying on the couch leafing through the 9/24 issue of the New Yorker -- the one with the World Trade Centers in black against a black background. The Talk of the Town section began: "In the wake of last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, New Yorker staff writers and contributors reflect on the tragedy and its consequences. This week's Talk of the Town is devoted entirely to the incident...."

Most of it was moving. Some of it was flat. Mostly it expressed a certain numbness.

And then there was Susan Sontag.

Here's how she began her blood-curdling screech:

The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

As I read I kept thinking: "No decent person would ever write or publish such a thing so near to 9/11." It suddenly occurred to me there must be others out there just like Susan Sontag -- vain, insensate, America-hating -- and not all of them were paranoid schizophrenics. No, indeed some were much-admired writers; others were, perhaps, prestigious magazine editors. And still others... ?

After glimpsing Susan Sontag's black soul I felt suddenly that I had been lied to all my life. I don't know why I felt this exactly -- perhaps it was just the shock of being let down. Or perhaps it was the realization that behind the witty gentility of the New Yorker -- a magazine I'd read avidly for upwards of fifteen years -- there lay attitudes I found repellent.

In short, I discovered I was keeping the wrong intellectual company. I subsequently began what Michael Blowhard calls Adventures in Righty Thought, and now consider myself a recovering liberal.

I wonder how many people changed their outlook based on the reaction to this single event.

Exactly. My outlook changed due to the reaction to this event by the left. Not so much the reaction by a handful of cranks like Sontag, but the rise of Howard Dean. Dean's rise was fueled by appealing to those who are influenced by cranks like Sontag. And except for Lieberman and Gephardt, Dean's opponents embraced "Deanism" rather than standing up to it. This proved to me that folks like Sontag are not some marginal fringe, but have taken over the Democratic party. And Kerry is their boy.

Gabriel,
It's not a problem most people do the same thing, especially if its an fairly impromptu response on a topich which you obviously feel strongly about. Is there any chance of you publishing a linked version I couls show to some friends of mine?

Morty, I'm with you. I was in the post-modernist club, too, and thought jeez, the Islamofascists are the worst possible enemy of mankind - we accuse "Promise Keepers" of such fundamentalist backwardness, but these guys are the real deal.

(Hell, I remember the indignation of myself and other pomos when the Taliban blew up the two historic Buddhist statues.)

Then after 9-11, who does the Left turn upon? The Americans, not the Islamic fanatics. It was then that I realized that the Left's true declared enemy is the U.S. as I know it - and since my passport is stamped "American" under "citizenship," I'm the face of their "enemy" (being a white male doesn't help in that regard, either).

I've often wondered about the European media's fixation with events in or undertaken by the U.S., without a similar scrutiny on their own domestic politics. At one time I had attributed this to (a) simply a function of the U.S. being the world's superpower, which understandably compells interest from abroad, and (b) a European healthy interest in world affairs that Americans do not share. Gabriel Gonzalez has framed this in a new light--that Europeans (and hence their media) do not see themselves as playing an active role in their own political culture, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. (I know he's talking about the French, but it seems the same phenomenon exists to a lesser extent throughout the continent.) Meanwhile, here in the U.S,, the more vocal and broader range of debate over policy makes our actions much more open to media scrutiny, at home and from abroad.

Denial is and has been a big problem about 9/11. I saw it immediately after the attack. It seems to be a function of a lot of things: political idealogy, fear, and detachment from direct consequences of the atrocity. Wonderful people I know and love quickly went into denial mode soon after the attack. They channel surfed passed news of the war in Afghanistan, avoided trips to New York, started scapegoating President Bush.

The analogy I like to use is one of a near-miss in a car accident. All people know they are mortal and they are going to die, but this "knowledge" is cognitive and not emotional.
A near miss almost becomes a transcendent experience where you come to grips at a gut level of what you presumably knew all along. It is what prompts a person who just missed getting creamed on the hightway to say "My God, I could have been killed." Presumably they drive home very carefully for a while, until that association becomes buried. That's where we are right now as a society. We are forgetting.

To be fair, this failure to take the issue seriously is at least half the fault of the Bush administration. They decided to characterize the reaction to 9/11 as "a war against terrorism", and while Muslims were involved, "Islam is a religion of peace". The latter statement is provisionally true on occasions, but it also skirts over, for example, all those hundreds of millions of dollars spent to export Wahhabism, and the significant percentage of Muslims who do support Al Qaeda's version of Islam. So a lot of people not unreasonably conclude that this "war" (and they wonder why it's called that) is only against a few hundred or a few thousand Qaeda members, and they wonder why we have a PATRIOT act, and why there's so much scrutiny of mosques and Islamic charities, and above all they wonder why we're invading Iraq, because what does that have to do with fighting a few hundred or a few thousand Qaeda members? So people conclude it's really about oil, or neocolonialism, or whatever. It's here that the Bushies fucked up the war of ideas to their great disadvantage. And ours.

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